BiotechMashup

(McGill University) A team of McGill Chemistry Department researchers led by Dr. Hanadi Sleiman has achieved a major breakthrough in the development of nanotubes.

Printing three-dimensional objects with incredibly fine details is now possible using “two-photon lithography”. With this technology, tiny structures on a nanometer scale can be fabricated. Researchers have now made a major breakthrough in speeding up this printing technique.

Scientists are reporting an advance in overcoming a major barrier to the use of the genetic material RNA in nanotechnology -- the field that involves building machines thousands of times smaller than the width of a human hair and now is dominated by its cousin, DNA. Their findings could speed the use of RNA nanotechnology for treating disease.

(American Chemical Society) Scientists are reporting an advance in overcoming a major barrier to the use of the genetic material RNA in nanotechnology -- the field that involves building machines thousands of times smaller than the width of a human hair and now is dominated by its cousin, DNA. Their findings, which could speed the use of RNA nanotechnology for treating disease, appear in the monthly journal ACS Nano.

Scientists have made a major genetic breakthrough that could change the way pediatric cancers are treated in the future. The researchers identified two genetic mutations responsible for up to 40 per cent of glioblastomas in children. The mutations were found to be involved in DNA regulation, which could explain the resistance to traditional treatments, and may have significant implications on the treatment of other cancers.

IBM scientists have created a 3D map of the earth so small that 1,000 of them could fit on one grain of salt. The scientists accomplished this through a new, breakthrough technique that uses a tiny, silicon tip with a sharp apex -- 100,000 times smaller than a sharpened pencil -- to create patterns and structures as small as 15 nanometers at greatly reduced cost and complexity. This patterning technique opens new prospects for developing nanosized objects in fields such as electronics, future chip technology, medicine, life sciences, and optoelectronics.

For the first time, scientists have been able to watch nanoparticles grow from the earliest stages of their formation. Nanoparticles are the foundation of nanotechnology and their performance depends on their structure, composition, and size. Researchers will now be able to develop ways to control conditions under which they are grown. The breakthrough will affect a wide range of applications including solar-cell technology and chemical and biological sensors.

Manipulating tiny objects like single cells or nanosized beads often requires relatively large, unwieldy equipment, but now a system that uses sound as a tiny tweezers can be small enough to place on a chip, according to engineers.

(Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard) A new robotic device made from DNA could potentially seek out specific cell targets and deliver important molecular instructions, such as telling cancer cells to self-destruct. Inspired by the mechanics of the body's own immune system, the technology represents a major breakthrough in the field of nanobiotechnology and might one day be used to program immune responses to treat various diseases.